Pew Research Center: Audience for Media Drops, Except for Radio

August 23, 2018

The audience for nearly every major sector of the U.S. news media fell in 2017 – with the only exception being radio, according to The Pew Research Center.

The evening audience for both local and network TV news declined 7%, while for cable it fell 12%, according to comScore TV Essentials and StationView Essentials data. Meanwhile, digital-native news sites’ audiences declined by 5% in terms of monthly unique visitors in 2017, according to comScore Media Metrix Multi-platform data. And the circulation for U.S. daily newspapers, whose audience has been steadily declining for several decades, fell by 11% last year, according to an analysis of data from the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM).

Radio was the only sector studied that did not show an audience decline, by several measures.

The overall audience for terrestrial radio – which includes all formats, not just news – has been around 90% for at least the past nine years, according to Nielsen Media Research data published by the Radio Advertising Bureau that looked at Americans ages 12 and older who listen in a given week.

The audience for programming from NPR and Public Radio International (PRI) also held steady in 2017, at 30 million and 9 million average weekly listeners respectively, according to data from those public broadcasters, while the audience for programming from American Public Media (APM) rose 7% in 2017. The audience for podcasting has grown over the past decade, with 17% of Americans 12 and older now listening to a podcast in the past week, according to Edison Research and Triton Digital. Again, this includes any type of programming, not just news.